Swashbuckler Illustration

I decided to go with Dribble over pinterest for my inspiration as I am always checking it and liking some of the amazing work posted there. I put a screenshot of some examples below but for a full catalogue of my inspiration my likes are here! -

I actually went in to the project with a fairly solid idea of the illustration I wanted to do as I had done a sketch a few days earlier, it was fairly lackluster but I was determined to make it work! I am absolutely horrendous at drawing feet so I actually did about 20 variations of just the feet in another page and ended up adding them last.

Here are the outlines I created in illustrator from the sketch (including brand new functioning feet!) I did make a few alterations from the original.

And now here are the outlines nicely blocked in! Not sure why I decided to do it in shades of grey but I found it worked well for me.

Now a fairly big leap here but my next screen is my final drawing, I spent altogether too long on shading for several hours over the weekend so I think I lost a little of the cartoony charm. However that said I am fairly happy with the final results. I really wanted the strong sense of light coming from the right of the character so also added some inner shadows using a white fill on the layer styles panel. Also I was never 100% happy with her face, I really suck when it comes to drawing faces and expressions. This course was pretty fantastic as a learning tool though, I have always been afraid to take my work in to photoshop and stuck with a illustrator only workflow, but now I think I will be working there a hell of a lot more after this weekend.